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Facebook Analytics. Try this out and include screen shots if you like. Reflect on what insight you gained from these analytics.

It was most interesting for me to see my networks and how my friends are connected to each other! I already know that I spend too much time on facebook. It was also interesting to see which picture has the most likes…it was a picture I’d taken last week of me in a fancy dress on a Wednesday night. That was interesting (If you had asked me to guess which picture got the most likes, I would have said this picture):

When your chips are down, and your drinks are all goneI’ll still be here, wishing and waiting for you to come homeKaleidoscope eyes, sparkle at the worldMy emerald city, downtown girlIn the sickness of you, I’m just a white blood cellFighting like hell for you

Wolfram Alpha cannot grok my EE topic. It is a little complicated. I’m studying the effect of Koine Greek on the spread of Christianity. I could, of course, break it down and find information about the individual topics and put it together myself…but then Wolfram would be no more useful that Google.

4. Do a frivolous comparison or other kind of search – post to blog.

I am very disappointed. Wolfram promises to answer all of my random and irrelevant questions. So I asked it many things. I tried to find out what elevation John Green was born at. I tried to get it to translate “eggnog” in French. Then I attempt to get Wolfram to divide the number of Indo-European languages by the number of English words. The only consolation I have is that Wolfram provided me with a lovely list of the 447 Indo European languages. However, the list they gave me was incomplete. I noticed it was missing Elfdalian, and possibly some other languages. I am irritated.

NOTICE THE LACK OF ELFDALIAN. I NOTICED YOU: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/elfdalian.htm

ALSO: Note the language listed as “Od”. What is this? I can’t find a language called “Od” and Wolfram doesn’t know anything about it, either. Also, they included some “old languages” (example: Ancient Greek) but they did not include others (example: Old English). RAGE.

5. Ask at least 2 “knowledge issue” questions related to this tool and the goals of the company.

1. How much do people blindly trust this resource?

2. Is using Wolfram cheating?

6. After watching Conrad Wolfram’s TEDxBrussels talk, respond to the following question – Is it cheating to use Wolfram Alpha in Math homework?

Sometimes. Computational knowledge might be less important, but it is still the assignment.

5 Stages of Knowledge / Wisdom in Arabic mapped out by my journey with the Soundboard:

Introduction: That was me in the first three weeks. I was just struggling to understand the basics…to make it all connect in my head. The jargon was difficult and there was so much to remember! How are gains different than what we do on the sliders? Why do you turn it up in the subs instead of just turning it up normally? Where does this cord go? Wait…what are amps again? Which drums are the Toms? What do you mean, distortion?

Finding Out More: A lot of those questions were answered when we switched to the analog board (after I had time to learn it, of course). The layout was expanded and, on the day of the Youth Night, I spent the entire day working with the board. I could now use it, but effects were beyond me. I could now effectively do take down, set up, and soundcheck. But Equalizing? Nope. Beyond me. And I was still just getting a feel for the way things sound together…what to make louder, what to make quieter…etc.

Reaching Knowledge (A): Where I am now! I understand effects and, intellectually, understand Equalizing….but I wouldn’t feel confident doing it because I don’t have “the feel” for what each person/instrument needs, Eq wise. I can do basic troubleshooting, but beyond that I am next to useless. I understand back channels, compressors, etc…but I am just starting to realize the existence of the really complicated stuff…nevermind learning to use those things. I can do the recordings…but I could never program a soundboard. I can set up and take down, but I could never do the original wiring etc. Plus, I’ve only worked at our (admittedly large) church. I also still have a lot to learn about the way things sound. Example: just today, Reyn taught me that Acoustic guitars have about the same frequency as the vocalists, so if you want the voices to pop you can turn down the acoustics.

Reaching Knowledge (B): Ethan. He’s read the manual and has been doing this longer. There’s Tony, too, who has been doing this for the same amount of time I have but was able to attend 5 services a week for 4 weeks.

Absorption: Tyler (he who is teaching me) and Tait! They can keep up with all the changes Reyn makes.

Wisdom: Reyn. Reyn is the head of Sound Ministry at our church. He ordered the new board and, with Tyler and Tait programmed it. He has his own sound and lighting business. He is the one who makes the decisions. The rest of us follow orders. He is amazingly skilled.

Atramentous is not crepuscular even though they are both synonyms for dark.

2 + 2 = 4

Toilet paper has no calories.

What type is the easiest to learn? What type tends to stick the longest?
For me, the “know that” is the easiest to learn. It sticks into my head easily and stays there. Experiential knowledge, however, lasts the longest for me. I’m never going to forget have to start a conversation…and I certainly will forget Soundboardery is I don’t use it.

I think that, in the end, sense perception, language, emotion, and reasoning are extremely relevant to all the categories of knowledge. For example, for me to internalize how to perform CPR, I have to see it done and hear instructions on it. When people tell me what to do, it needs to make sense. I need to know why I’m doing chest compression in the part of the chest I’m doing them. And if I’m in a situation that requires me to perform CPR, I need to have my emotions in check and be constantly watching the person who needs me.

_____Curate something on memory

Pg. 108-9: Justification Types

Revelation affects people no matter their profession. For example, if a doctor is Christian and working with a Christian patient (ex: Edna) then the doctor might be encourage the patient to recognize hope even when science can’t help them.

Pg. 110-111: Intensity of Belief

The relationship between belief, truth, knowledge, and justification.

Pg. 114: Do I Believe?

_____After reading about the 3 “s’s”: SOURCE, STATEMENTS, and SELF, choose something you’ve learned recently and evaluate it based on these, using specific examples:

Claim: Crohns is an inflammation of the bowels. It can affect the entire GI track. A low fiber diet is sometimes necessary if there is diarrhea. There is no set diet; Crohns patients must be taken on a case by case basis depending on symptoms and if the disease is in remission. An illeal resection is sometimes necessary but only in extreme cases. Crohns sucks. These are my hardest patients–but also among the most rewarding.

Source: Mother, MPH, RD, CDE

Motive for deception: No.

Reputation of accuracy: Yes.

Altered Mind: No.

Expert: Yes.

Counterclaims: “Do you acknowledge counterclaims?” “There aren’t away, sure there is always new information, but the basics of nutrtion don’t change.” -Mother

Acknowledges Limitations: Yes.

The context to the delivery of the claim does not affect the meaning. Mother and I were driving home from school, and I told her to impart knowledge upon me. She asked me what I wanted to know, and I told her to tell me about Crohns disease and Colitis.

Values/background/goals openly stated: No.

Accompaniments: No.

Are the claims supported by evidence: When, after we got home, I pressed Mother, she brought out What to Eat with IBD. She also has had Crohns patients.

I am inclined to trust this source.

I’m not particularly cynical when Mother is teaching me nutrition stuff. I ask her a lot of questions, and if she doesn’t know the answer she looks it up. She can usually support her claims very well. Plus, I know that she is recognized in her field (she’s won this award and that award, she was the president of the HDA, she teaches classes, she reads journals and applies the knowledge.)

My past experience with Crohns comes from reading a book about the digestive system, talking to Mother, and talking to my gastroenterologist.

Sure, it is possible. I do that often with philosophical statements. But I don’t think that this requires me to do that. This is not the most controversial of statements.

FUN FACT: The most common response a sound technician will give while at work is “what?” How do I know? Experience.

1) A Clockwork Orange is a social commentary. It chooses to give information about the characters to illustrate a point about society and human nature. There are no facts in this book, instead we learn about the characters and the society and that information, though not factual, reveals the truth the author is attempting to illustrate. There is actually a serious knowledge issue with the last chapter: in the first American edition, the last chapter was controversially omitted. This completely altered the impact of the book. Wikipedia explains the situation well: “The book has three parts, each with seven chapters. Burgess has stated that the total of 21 chapters was an intentional nod to the age of 21 being recognised as a milestone in human maturation. The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986.[3] In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he first brought the book to an American publisher, he was told that U.S. audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways, decides he has lost all energy for and thrill from violence and resolves to turn his life around (a slow-ripening but classic moment of metanoia—the moment at which one’s protagonist realises that everything he thought he knew was wrong). At the American publisher’s insistence, Burgess allowed their editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the U.S. version, so that the tale would end on a darker note, with Alex succumbing to his violent, reckless nature—an ending which the publisher insisted would be ‘more realistic’ and appealing to a U.S. audience.”

2) The violence and selfishness of human nature is what is emphasized…and also human complacency. The rest of the citizens in society have become complacent…they are like robots. Alex is apprehended by the police and turned into a defenseless robot by a conditioning technique that made him physically incapable of violent acts. He is a robot, too. But a series of events drives him back to his old ways…but, in the controversial last chapter, he grows up. He simply stops wanting to be violent.

3) The language in A Clockwork Orange was one of my favorite parts of the book. Nadsat is really why I chose this book to analyze. This book will never become dated because the language is timeless. People 100 years from now will struggle with the language as much as modern readers. But what I liked best about the language was the way it worked. You are reading the book, and you become engrossed in the world. The language pulls you in and makes it more real. The language, for me, did not pose any kind of barrier. I didn’t use any sort of dictionary. I just read it and grokked it. I felt like I was in Alex’s head. For more info on Nadsat and the fascinating functionality of it, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat

4) What is the context of A Clockwork Orange? I didn’t know. My only guess was that it had to do with Russia, maybe (because Nadsat involves a lot of Russian). So I did some research and found this:

A prolific writer, John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–1993) didn’t publish his first novel until he was almost forty. Born and raised in Manchester, England, Burgess spent most of his adult life abroad in the army before teaching in Malaya with the British Colonial Service. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1960, Burgess began writing at a frantic pace in the hope that the royalties from his books would support his wife after he died. He wrote five novels that year alone. When he later discovered that his condition had been misdiagnosed, Burgess continued to write and publish novels at a rapid rate. Though he wrote nearly forty novels, his most famous work is the dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange (1962), which owes much of its popularity to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation. Burgess himself thought that A Clockwork Orange was far from his best work. In an interview, he dismissed the book as gimmicky and didactic, and rued the idea that this book would survive while others that he valued more were sure to pass into obscurity.

Burgess’s novels address fundamental issues of human nature and morality, such as the existence of good and evil and the importance of free will. Burgess was raised as a Catholic, and though he left the church as a young man, he retained his admiration for its tenets and doctrines. Although Burgess was interested in and influenced by numerous religions, Catholicism exerted the greatest influence on his moral views. His portrayal of human beings as inherently predisposed toward violence, for example, reflects his acceptance of the Catholic view that all human beings are tainted by original sin.

Burgess was inspired to write A Clockwork Orange during a visit to Leningrad in 1961. There, he observed the state-regulated, repressive atmosphere of a nation that threatened to spread its dominion over the world. At the time of his visit, the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, and communism was establishing itself in countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Cuba. Burgess regarded communism as a fundamentally flawed system, because it shifts moral responsibility from the individual to the state while disregarding the welfare of the individual. Burgess’s deeply internalized Catholic notions of free will and original sin prevented him from accepting a system that sacrifices individual freedom for the public good. A Clockwork Orange may be seen in part as an attack on communism, given the novel’s extremely negative portrayal of a government that seeks to solve social problems by removing freedom of choice.

During his visit to Leningrad, Burgess encountered the stilyagi, gangs of thuggish Russian teenagers. While Burgess was eating dinner at a restaurant one night, a group of bizarrely dressed teenagers pounded on the door. Burgess thought they were targeting him as a westerner, but the boys stepped aside graciously when he left and then resumed pounding. Burgess insists that he based nadsat—the invented slang of his teenage hooligans inA Clockwork Orange—on Russian for purely aesthetic reasons, but it seems likely that this startling experience influenced his portrayal of Alex and his gang. Along with English Teddy Boys, a youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s associated with American rock music, the Russian gangs provided a template for the hoodlums in AClockwork Orange.

However, A Clockwork Orange shouldn’t be understood simply as a critique of the Soviet Union or of communism, because the dystopian world of the novel draws just as much on elements of English and American society that Burgess detested. In his own estimation, Burgess had a tendency toward anarchy, and he felt that the socialistic British welfare state was too willing to sacrifice individual liberty in favor of social stability. He despised American popular culture for fostering homogeneity, passivity, and apathy. He regarded American law enforcement as hopelessly corrupt and violent, referring to it as “an alternative criminal body.” Each of these targets gets lampooned in A Clockwork Orange, but Burgess’s most pointed satire is reserved for the psychological movement known as behaviorism.

Popularized by Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s, behaviorism concerned itself with the study of human and animal behavior in response to stimuli. Through the application of carefully controlled system of rewards and punishments—a process referred to as conditioning—Skinner demonstrated that scientists could alter the behavior of test subjects more effectively than had previously been thought possible. (In one famous experiment, he successfully trained laboratory pigeons to play ping pong.) To many people, behaviorism seemed to offer an almost limitless potential to control human behavior, and the movement had a profound effect not only in academia, but on education, government, and criminal rehabilitation as well. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess satirizes behaviorism with his portrayal of the fictional Ludovico’s Technique.

Burgess was still a relatively unknown writer when he published A Clockwork Orangein 1962, and the novel was not an immediate success. To Burgess’s dismay, the American version of the novel was published without the final chapter, in which Alex grows up and renounces violence. Burgess strongly disapproved of this decision, which he believed had distorted the novel into a nasty tale of unredeemable evil. Ironically, it was the American edition of the novel that became a cult classic among college students, and it was also the edition that Stanley Kubrick used for his 1971 film adaptation.

Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange was both commercially successful and highly controversial, catapulting Burgess to a much wider fame. Initially labeled with an X rating and widely criticized for glorifying sex and violence, the film was blamed for several incidents of copycat violence, including one notorious British case in which a group of men, in imitation of the film, gang-raped a woman while singing “Singing in the Rain.” Despite the scandal, however, Burgess remained an eminent literary personality from then on. Regarded as both an artistic luminary and an eccentric crank, Burgess made several television appearances and served as a visiting professor at universities throughout America and England. He continued writing and composing music—like his protagonist Alex, Burgess loved classical music and considered it his first vocation—until his death in 1993

_____Answer: What are your thoughts about the sanctity of books and how did you arrive to your decision?

I am a writer. I know how much heart goes into. I think that books are sacred because author’s put their heart and soul into what they write. If someone tore up a copy of my book, I would be very sad….do they have any idea how many hours of sweat and blood I put into that? Do they know that I tore off a piece of my soul to give my characters life? Seriously, books are sacred because of how much effort went into making them and the potential they hold. It doesn’t matter that they are not immortal; books are a collect of knowledge and information. If you rip a book up without reading it, you are throwing out potential. Also, on a gut level the idea offends me. I have a huge respect for books. I don’t dog ear pages. I don’t bend them backwards…and it is not only because they contain information. It could be a horribly written book that contains no literary or factual value (example: ttyl by Lauren Myracle)…but someone took the time to write it, and I believe that a fundamental respect for people extends to their work.

_____Answer: Do books really “hold learning”?

Books hold information. Learning, for me, is something that people do. It is an action, not something that can be held. Now, that being said, I think that books are an amazing resource. For topics of great interest to me, I move away from the Internet and into books. For example, I want to know about the history of Christianity, so I’m looking for a book. I could read a bunch of articles on the Internet or journals on the Internet, but I want to read it in a hard copy book. Why? Because the information is all in one place that I can easily reference ..and also because, even though the Internet has trustworthy sites and books are not always reliable and filled with good info, I feel that books are better.

_____Answer: How would you rate where you get knowledge.

I get my knowledge from books, Internet articles, people, God, and my own observations. More often then not, it is not a single place where I get knowledge on a specific topic, even. I might observe something and wonder which causes me to look up information on the Internet.